Ashmolean The Elements of Drawing, John Ruskin’s teaching collection at Oxford

In good condition, the surface a little dirty - particularly around the edges - and a smudge running diagonally down through the right-hand edge of the nearer tower from a point about 6 cm from the top edge. The verso is inaccessible. Although almost entirely in graphite, Ruskin has used watercolour and bodycolour to colour some of the coats of arms and architectural mouldings, and pen and ink to add a balcony railing.

The drawing shows the Piazza dei Signori in Verona, looking south from the northern corner. On the left edge is the Palazzo dei Tribunali, together with its merloned tower; then the Palazzo del Comune, with the high Torre Lamberti rising above it. Part of the Palazzo dei Giudici appears on the right-hand edge.

Ruskin was in Verona at intervals from May to August in 1869, the year to which he dates the drawing in his Verona catalogue (no. 43 = XIX.457). Taylor has associated it with a letter to Charles Eliot Norton of 13 June, where Ruskin states that he was drawing in the Piazza dei Signori when he met Longfellow - an event also described in a letter of 4 June (the latter in Cook and Wedderburn, XIX.liv).

The drawing was first recorded in the Oxford collection only in 1906, when Cook and Wedderburn noted that it had been placed in frame no. 80 of the Reference Series to replace Ruskin's drawing of Santa Maria della Spina, Pisa, which by then was in the collection of the Guild of Saint George (XXI.33 n. 5).

In the Verona catalogue, Ruskin drew attention to the 'noble sweep of delicately ascending curves sloped inwards' of the Torre Lamberti.